Most quadcopters in development seem to rely heavily on external processing or expensive motion caption systems such as a Vicon system. However the quadcopter developed by Horiken Engineering doesn’t, and it’s tiny.

Due to external processing or the reliance on motion capture systems, quadcopters are rarely truly autonomous, heavily limiting the scope. However the students from the department of aerospace at the University of Tokyo have developed one capable of fully autonomous flight. Through the use of two cameras and a sonar and the other usual gubbins found in a Quadocopter, it’s capable of capturing enough data to fly stably. The data is processed in real-time on the Cortex-M4 MCU, Spartan-6 FPGA and 64MB of DDRSDRAM.

The quadcopter is currently able to detect and track a static image (somewhat akin to a QR code). This is shown in the video demonstration which also shows real-time data sent from the quadcopter. Note: There’s no data sent to the quadcopter, all this is transmit only.